Gold is the Bull
Composed by Isabella S (Year 11)
My daughter, I leave this for you.
The proceeding events I am about to share are not fiction. They are not a cautionary tale made to instil morals into misbehaving children, they are not for entertainment, nor are they for attention or exploitation. The following events have been passed down on paper to me, from my mother, from her mother, from her mother and from her mother, Deborah Hatt by her maiden name. Every first born of my generation has shared this story, every first born failing multitudes of times in their desperate attempt to sway those tempted away from the golden bull. Many people will take this tale for either a fairytale or ghost story, but I swear on everything I have ever loved, it is fact, through and through. Whether you choose to heed this warning or not is entirely on your behalf. You will not be caught if you choose this road, no accountability will you have to take. That is part of the deal, I believe. The only condemning force that will harm you before you breathe your last breath is your own consciousness, and that is only yours to wrestle. The evil of the bull itself is not what drives so many to temptation, but humanity’s own greed. I do not have much time, not now, not anymore. I have long neglected my inherited responsibility, dismissing it all completely for a hoax, but truth is given to us all in time. It was only a matter of patience, of anticipation. If my own daughter is reading this, as I hope, please know no mother wants to burden their children with this; but roads do not always wind the way we want them to, and it is better off that way. I am so sorry, I love you.
Gold is the Bull
Wondering and wistful remains a world I'll now never know. Steadily my peers flock from this feeble town, away from this stale countryside, this agricultural secret of wealth unburied. Friends, once beloved and loyal, trickled from my grasp, to education, to apprenticeships, to marriage and opportunity; dreams that were once a hopeful commodity in my mind, now transformed into a piece of fiction, never to be touched by hands such as these. The Constable said my parents silently joined a group of travelling missionaries passing by our local church; and took my baby sister with them. He said this was a typical case of parental abandonment; that my parents were still free people, that he couldn't do anything about it. I am a surrogate mother now, the eldest sister and provider for a 10 year old girl who doesn’t know how to eat with her mouth closed and a 14 year old boy who, despite receiving a decent upper class education, has already been imprisoned on two separate occasions for meddling with others property. The only reason he hasn’t found himself already dwelling in a prison cell is because of my father’s intervention. I was going to be somebody, the person little girls want to be and who critics praise to high heaven. My heart and head for once held hands and their tenderness gave birth to a conceivable hope. A gem of the opera stage was who I, the singing canary, Deborah Hatt, ought to be. Now, it's all a tease, a mocking, condescending grin from the corner of a bright window that's too high to climb down from. All I can do now is lose this unfair game of cards with grace.
Father and Mother were not of noble status, but they were quite far from destitute. I believe with hope that for the while, our little family will be able to scrape by. Little skill do I hone outside of my musical talents, and if we do truly become desperate, it would cause me a heavy ache to have Daniel and Ida abandon their education. More so, of course, to add to my barrel load of burdens, my sister has for long years suffered from a certain spell of night inflictions, and it seems this harsh abandonment has awakened the most spiteful of devils to torment her. Her nightmares are insistent and have happened every night for the past week or so. Little Ida consistently comes to my room, choking on her own sobs as if her tears were thick green bile. Once she at last finds her slumber, her mutterings are jumbled and freakish, in such a crude manner it is truly like her dreams are begging for a friend.
Ida has not slumbered a continuous night for much too long. With great and powerful desperation searched endlessly to discover what in the cold hell below these night terrors may entail, if I can find the root of them, or at least just a decent excuse, but all I can draw from her is quivering weeps and all too fast breath. Yes, on multiple occasions I have tried to interrogate her once at last she has gathered her sanity again, but it is almost as if she falls beneath some amnesiac trance. Ida is a brutish, rather annoying piece of work when she isn’t upset, and I cannot even encourage her to tidy her wardrobe, let alone open up to her heart upon her dear old sister. I suppose that is to be expected, especially now. I, at 10 years of age, didn’t take mother speaking more with father than I well, and I cannot even imagine how I would have coped with this circumstance at that age. Ida has never been weak, so I suppose I just have to have faith in her girlish strength for now. Shall I suppose a doctor from London’s heart could interpret her mutterings and prescribe a miracle elixir, one that would send her into a sound slumber for the rest of her nights; I would have it be done in a fraction of my beating heart’s rhythm, though in spite of my wishes, the money we still have I shall not bet. I do have some evidence to suffice my aching curiosity at this moment of time. The sleep talking. Never have I been the cleverest girl, yet psychology and its matters of the heart have been my strong point. Majority of Ida’s muffled speech is incomprehensible, leastways to I, yet oddly enough, there is a stringing pattern of words, if you can call them that. A sort of mumbling song, a childish prose which always sounds the same. This strange poetry is always accompanied with a sleeping contortion of trembling distress. An expression not of a young girl but of a man at the gallows, coming face to face with a satan he knows all too well, an adversary in every sense of the word. Though after that visual tormentation, that sickening display of uncanny maturity, she looks like a little girl again, and exhaustion consumes my heart and soul, too much for a newly made mother to resist.
Elements of her mutterings I have discerned, though, to I, it all seems bleak and meaningless. Ida in her wakeful state claims to have no memory, not of a single word. Croaked words of gold and priests pattern her unconscious speech, spoken with the rhythm of a nursery rhyme; in which I assume it is likely a strange recurring nightmare, a childish manner of processing the abandonment. Sometimes, even in her terrified state, I envy her youth, her imaginative escape. The means to escape at all. That is a luxury no eldest daughter can afford; not with our family in such a discombobulated disarray.
As the clock’s hands creak by with meager excitement, so along with it does my days. Marriage, I will not abide until the freeing day my siblings are no longer dependent upon me, and on that day my dreams will be an elderly stain, bleeding on an unfitting dress. What does love matter at all if in love I abandon what I loved first, some wicked Judas I would render onto myself, and his end would become mine, by a straining rope’s beckoning loop and the Akeldama desert’s dead tree. At the most cruel of times my heart devises wicked schemes my soul wants no part of, haughty thoughts of running away in the night with some kind nobleman and reinstalling my childish dreams of the opera somewhere where I am no surrogate mother, no bleeding heart and certainly no victim. No victim of abandonment will I become again, but no victim will I make again of my brother and sister again either. While the clock’s hand still continues to tick with feeble enthusiasm, and letters from moved on friends begin to dwindle onto a halt, the best I can do for now is place one firm foot in front of the other.
This overly evident state of desolation I've found myself dwindling upon does not lie completely in the fright of solitude, perhaps. Though, my one woman company isn’t the most kind, nor the most friendly; Miss Cobbler, our long time maid. A stout, elderly woman, of a disagreeable and bickering disposition. She would have been keen to dash off into the city, abandoning us like all the rest, if it wasn’t for her perpetual poverty. It isn’t the obvious inclination of many to think my father underpaid her- or at least that was I was told- but rather her unholy craving to spend each and every night, half dead, by the rundown wine-house. Of course, in response to the lack of pay, Miss Cobbler has not been eager to work. With ease and complete legality, quite simply I could leave her for the streets; but I have not made a habit of letting my hastier, crueler inclinations get the better of my otherwise moral behaviour, and I do not plan on it. So I suppose, for the time being, having a slightly psychotic, alcohol-loving woman grumbling night and day throughout our already melancholy home will have to do. Her illusionary alcohol-composed mania sessions are commonplace, drenched lavishly in incomprehensible, meaningless blabber. Despite this, she did say something rather strange to me, (something especially strange. From my experience the drunk have a love for saying strange things for supposedly no reason.) A series of mutterings which weren’t of her typical wine induced rage, specifically for me. It impressioned onto me as something I ought not to forget, as if a shockingly relevant dream or a person’s last words.
“Oh- Miss Cobbler! Careful not to-!” Miss Cobbler, in a drunken haze, had already collapsed idiotically into my father’s portrait, knocking it from its original perch mindlessly. The bearded man’s face appearing as if he were playing a deadly game of poker. At glancing upon the image of his face for what could have been a unguessable variety of reasons, Miss Cobbler was sent spiraling into an unrestrained rage, her face contorting in such a manner one could have supposed the portrait carried a foul odour. She raised her fist in a thoughtless flurry and moments before it divorced the canvas into two, Daniel, who prior to the quarrel had been scraping mud from his shoes onto the carpet, in typical delinquent fashion, tore her hand away. The same rage which painted itself onto Miss Cobbler’s face in that moment instead loomed onto Daniel’s, his rage directed at both her and the portrait. Without another word, my brother, torn indecisively between the enraged flare of boyhood and the hunching responsibility of manhood, grumbled, and retired to his room once again. With a rather pathetic effort I attempted to usher him back, which of course, yielded to no result. Like the mother of a martyr, I gathered the slightly calmed drunk woman in my arms, and placed her onto the armchair.
“Miss? Do- would you like a glass of water?” That only seemed to upset her more so.
“No. No, I do not want for anything. Leave me be. It runs in the family, doesn’t it? The greed. The greed you crave like air!” The words clammered from her mouth at such speed, it seemed she was instead of comfortable in a velvet armchair, caught beneath the spiteful glint of a French guillotine. My heart rattled with the unsavoury thought—no—the unbraved knowledge; the knowledge that what she had just spoken was something more than the wine’s tongue, that Miss Cobbler was in fact capable of a tint of wise judgement. She was right, or, at the very least, she knew something I had not yet concluded.
“It is just as that accursed rhyme! Oh! I cannot bring myself to say it! The rhyme your father sang in your youth- I remember it all too well…”
“Miss…? I think it would be best if you lie down-’
“No! You- you listen here! You know exactly what I speak of! The sickness of your father! And his father before him!”
The silence of that moment was a sickening display; an uncanny mixture of confusion and mutual acknowledgement. Still, my heart was in a biological protest, the loyalty of an eldest daughter like a contortionist puppeteering my lips.
“My father was- is a good man. He did not abandon us for no good reason.”
Miss Cobbler snickered; a spiteful and shameless sound.
“You foolish girl. The pinnacle of idiocy, you are. It’s a curse. All of it. Ida, her nightmares; Godly Rebuttal. The sins of your father. It was almost me first, almost. With the constable. Now it’s your mother and sister. She- she would not even understand the reek of blood yet. No anatomy. She cannot even walk.”
Her vocalisation suddenly was unlike that of a hysteric drunk, but instead in the very same manner of a mourning matriarch.
“I don’t understand. Miss Cobbler, what happened with the constable? Do you know about mother and-”
Through it all, her voice, strained from decades of shouting, crackled into a throbbing of the most bitter tears I had ever heard. Just as Daniel before her, wordlessly, she stood, her short, round legs shaking beneath her, and disappearing down the hall. The echoes of her strained weeps allowed me no consolation. I sat there still, in the very same kneeling position as I had been before. The portrait stared back at me, and I could at last see something I had never seen before. An overriding of a parental love I once thought invincible, an inaudible scream. My father’s eyes held no warmth. In truth, they never truly did. Was it all mere farce? A placebo effect? It was always my nature, the first to trust and the last to doubt. Any question of what to do next, some sort of action or conversation, I had thought not of. The only thought dominating my mind was a hunching of horror, a gut-swallowing panic; the predetermined knowledge that something evil, something I had not yet comprehended, had already occurred, and I, an idiot of a woman, had not been any the wiser to it.
I was eclipsed into an all powerful surge of indescribable panic, or rather, guilt. Guilt for an act I did not commit, an act I knew nothing of. It was as if a more omnipotent version of me took possession of my heart. This disabling heartache lasted for about an hour more; and in the same position on the floor I remained, my chest a heaving pump, my breath gluttonous for air. It was only when Ida asked for dinner that I regained some resemblance of composure.